When hardware Kickstarters ship | Hacker News Reader

When hardware Kickstarters ship

engineering.koalasafe.com

169 pointssteven_pack87 comments

I've shipped one hardware product on Kickstarter [1] and I'm in the process of fulfilling the second [2]. Lessons I've learned are:

1. Design with your factory. Finding a good supplier is important but the real work starts once you've shaken hands. Your factory is your greatest resource as a presumably inexperienced hardware designer. It's like having an expert-level consultant work on your project for free, so take advantage of it.

2. Keep it extremely simple. MVP applies here. Your project will probably fail if it does not have the absolute minimum viable number of hardware features. The majority of your effort should be spent thinking about how to simplify your designs. Avoid moving parts if possible, and design parts that can be produced with simple tooling.

3. Your margins should be higher than you think. Think long and hard about your pricing before you launch your Kickstarter. Chances are, your MSRP is optimistically low. Bringing a hardware product to market involves lots of expensive rabbit holes. High margins will save you from death.

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rideye/rideye-the-black...

[2] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/voltus/voltus-mobile-po...

Out of curiosity, did you end up shipping to the rest of your Kickstarter pledgers for [1]?

Yes, all pledges were fulfilled and the product is now shipping through our website and retail channels.

Awesome. I asked mainly because after being hit by a car, I'm definitely in the market for a product like yours.

Email me at cedric@rideye.com and I'll send you a coupon code!

Are you finding any significant amount of "post kickstarter" orders?

Yes. Ideally, Kickstarter orders should be the tip of the iceberg for you. The number of people who will pledge real money for an in-development product on Kickstarter is a tiny subset of those who will buy it once it's available for next-day shipping on your website.

I'm in that boat— I've been watching RidEye since early in the Kickstarter, but don't really count on hardware Kickstarters until V1 is shipped and reviewed, especially after hearing about the infamous espresso machine Kickstarter, which was run by some of my girlfriend's classmates.

The Lexan inlays are laser cut to a precise, water resistant fit (from Rideye campaign page)

A little off topic but the Epilog guy told us never cut Lexan or any polycarbonate plastic because it makes a chloride gas thats dangerous to humans and destructive to the laser. But lexan rocks as a building material... So FUD? or does it require special considerations?

Sounds like you might be mixing two bits of advice. There are many materials you never cut with a laser cutter, such as PVC or vinyl (makes chlorine gas) or ABS plastic (makes cyanide and melts). Thick Lexan shouldn't be cut with an infrared laser, not necessarily because it produces harmful materials but because it will scorch and burn rather than cut. You might be able to cut it with a different type of laser cutter. And some other forms of polycarbonate may cut better (materials informally called "Lexan" sometimes aren't). You would need some detailed knowledge of the exact material and laser cutter, and thus some expertise.

See http://atxhackerspace.org/wiki/Laser_Cutter_Materials for some details.

I'm literally going to print that page and hang it over the cutter. Thanks.

Note: That page does say in the second paragraph: "It is not always obvious which materials will work - for example: Polycarbonate/Lexan produces flames and lethal chlorine gas which will rapidly corrode this $40,000 machine into uselessness and which is extremely hazardous to the health of people nearby." That sounds like its in shouting distance of the Epilog guy's warning.

Which is exactly why I ended with "You would need some detailed knowledge of the exact material and laser cutter, and thus some expertise."; cutting any kind of polycarbonate sounds like a bad idea if you don't know exactly what you're doing.

Polycarbonate doesn't have any chlorine at all in its chemical formula. Maybe the usual types of Lexan contain plasticizers/flame retardants/other additives that contain chlorine?

The London Hackspace Wiki has a little write up on how to test plastics for Chlorine: https://wiki.london.hackspace.org.uk/view/Laser_Cutter/Instr...

Chlorine, not chloride.

>1. Design with your factory. Finding a good supplier is important but the real work starts once you've shaken hands. Your factory is your greatest resource as a presumably inexperienced hardware designer. It's like having an expert-level consultant work on your project for free, so take advantage of it.

Your first lesson applies not only to small teams launching on Kickstarter, but also to the best and biggest manufacturing companies in the world. The feedback loop between the production team and the design team was the most important step in the design process at Denso.

The Rideye looks great. Is that based off the keychain cams widely used in R/C video? Like the 808 #16 or the Möbius?

That was the original design intent, since the 808 camera provided all the video recording functions I needed. I thought I would just buy a bunch of cameras and make some carrier boards for them. I was just out of college at the time, and my coworkers recognized my naivety. They suggested I contact the 808 manufacturer for a custom board spin, and that opened my eyes to the world of mass manufacturing in China. To make a long story short, I completely redesigned the product for scale [1] and that's the version I shipped to my backers.

In retrospect, the original version which I presented on Kickstarter would have been a miserable failure of a product. I was lucky to have backers who supported me and provided invaluable feedback through a few months of delays while I finished the redesign.

[1] http://www.rideye.com/

You could make this a dashcam? AFAIK most dashcams have terrible battery life and so have to be plugged in to the car charger

Oh, your first plan was to actually build a board to frob the buttons on the 808? If so, it was a good idea not to do that. I've used 808s in R/C and they're very finicky, they will just error out for no reason sometimes. The Mobius is more robust but throws off a lot of heat.

So did you end up using the 808/Mobius manufacturer in the process at all, or completely do everything from scratch? Is at least the lens module + camera controller chip a self-contained module? Would be interested to hear which vendors you used.

Yes, I've shipped a hardware project on kickstarter, and (just) on time - the original article is a tad unfair, as if they were the only ones to ever ship.

And I designed my own hardware ..... the trick is to design your hardware BEFORE you announce your kickstarter, not after ....

Mind giving a link to your project?

oh sure here it is:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/moonbaseotago/onerng-an...

Ah, nice writeup about the production, too!

Yeah, I thought the title was a little exaggerated, too. They aren't the only Kickstarter to ship hardware on time. I shipped my hardware Kickstarter on time, and I did all the hardware and software design, and made the product in the US. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/synthino/synthino-xm-po...

Hehehe, yeah admittedly the "actually" part was exaggerated, but it definitely hit a nerve. There is this sort of tacit understanding hardware kickstarters are often late, but obviously not all, as all the good folk who have posted their own on here have shown.

I think it's a good idea for inexperienced creators to design before the Kickstarter launch, but I wouldn't want to exclude the genuinely riskier ideas that require funding for R&D. Kickstarter's a perfect venue for that, assuming everyone knows the risks.

What level of fidelity (e.g. self-made prototype, small batch of manufactured prototypes, etc.) would you recommend before going on kickstarter?

it really depends, I have my own pick&place and can do small production runs at home. Before I announced my kickstarter I'd run ~50 prototypes and was running a (free) beta test with a small interested group

I think you need to have something real to show people, absolutely NO handwaving.

Even before you commit to a factory, you can get useful information out of their production engineers, who will often tell you a thing to change to make your part manufacturable, or cheaper. But you will burn them out if you don't commit.

Harder to burn out is ProtoLabs' automated quoting/DFM site. Upload your 3D file and it'll tell you what you're doing wrong in a few hours.

As someone who's now shipped 2 hardware KickStarters on time (both of which were bigger than KoalaSafe), I find it a frustrating when people post up 'hardware KickStarters never ship'. It's just not true.

It's definitely 'buyer beware', and if you back a KickStarter that shows loads of renderings and no working finished product then you may hit trouble - but many people come to KickStarter with a working product, having already done their homework and made arrangements with a manufacturer. Those people will almost certainly ship, and it's a shame that other failed KickStarter projects make them look less legitimate.

But I totally agree with polar8 on this...

1. Design with the factory has been true for me. I did one KS in China, one in the UK - and the factories work totally differently. The time it takes to get things arranged is insane, and you absolutely need to not only have a manufacturer, but to have a design that they're happy with and can source parts for before you KickStart if you plan to ship on time (even if you plan on tweaking the design a bit later).

2. Sourcing - When you order 1000s of something, suddenly lead times matter. Generally you can't just go to Farnell and get things next-day, if they're not in stock, 13 week lead times are not uncommon - and a company can have 4000 items in stock one day, and they'll be gone the next (so checking stock levels is not enough!).

3. Features - definitely be sensible. Listen to your backers but be very careful about adding their suggestions. Changes really set you back, and the most vocal backers views are almost certainly not those of the majority. Adding features in software after the ship date is easy and people like it, but delaying the ship date for features would rarely be appreciated.

4. Margins. I think people feel bad about adding a big margin, but you've got to. There are loads of hidden costs, and most backers would prefer to pay a bit extra and have you still making and supporting devices 2 years from now.

I completely agree. As a hardware maker (e-watches) with KS experience (2 campaigns), I find it frustrating that hardware projects on KS start with a negative perception from the public. It seems to me that a track record indicator is missing on KS. Like ebay feedback or a star-rating system...something that people can quickly look at and determine the level of reliability of a returning hardware maker. The number of project created is not enough...it does not speak about level of satisfaction.

As a hardware maker on Kickstarter who is about to ship [1], I can sort-of agree with what the article is saying. Yes, one of the most important things is to find THE right partner in China, as that can easily make or break your product.

However, if you're afraid to build your own hardware (or at least drastically modify something pre-existent), you're severely limiting your flexibility and the areas where you can innovate. Maybe it worked well for Koalasafe, which sounds like could have very well be built as just a modified version of OpenWRT with a simple installer. But it certainly wouldn't work for more than half of the other hardware projects out there. Look at the most succesful projects - Pebble, Coolest Cooler, The Micro, Dash - none of these could have gotten where they are without custom firmware.

Going back to KoalaSafe - the $100k they raised may sound like a lot of money, but it's certainly not enough to develop the kind of hardware they are using. It's enough maybe for the software part and some prototypes. You have to set your expectations straight too, and I do believe they did the best anyone could do with that money. Congrats on delivering!

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1635386542/anymote-home...

Agree zrgiu - we were able to avoid the hardware design aspect, but the projects you mentioned certainly couldn't - that is their whole point of existing.

I have used your app on HTC One. Liked it but unlocking the phone to use a remote app was more cumbersome than just grabbing the remote.

I like the approach Peel is taking. Show what's currently on TV and click on what you want to watch and it automatically switches the channel to that show. That's a real good use of the smartphone app, since flicking through channels on TV is really inefficient

That's maybe a discussion for another medium, but we're actually updating the app right now with a customizable notification - so you have access to your commands from anywhere (including lockscreen) without any kind of intrusion. Also, we already have a floating remote (facebook chathead-style) that shows on top of the lockscreen. Best of all - you can configure it to show only while you're on the home wifi.

Since they make money only with advertising, Peel is only focused on TV-watching. While we're going to have the same feature soon (tv guide with auto-switching), AnyMote is meant to do let you do much more than just control a TV and Set Top Box. It has all kinds of wifi lights support, receivers, media centers, etc.

I'd buy like 4 of these or any other IR bluetooth/Wifi adapters if they had an API so I could hook them up to my Echo. "Alexa, turn on South Park" (turns on TV, switches input, changes channel, etc etc).

Like this ? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bkk0Wqc_keg

Personally, the approach Peel is taking irritates me. Forces me to select a tv antenna/cable profile thing, when that's useless to me. I have no antenna, I have no cable, I just use a roku with netflix. Why does it have to be so complicated when all I need is a power button and volume control?

If all you want is a remote then SmartRemote is pretty good.

Still asks for a tv channel list, and that's the default page of the app.

I believe boundlessdreamz is talking about Smart IR Remote [1]. We named our app "Smart Remote" 2+ years ago, and after a month, Peel (the preloaded app) also renamed itself to Smart Remote (from Peel). We've held on to our name, and they've held on to theirs, which has caused a lot of confusion.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.remotefair...

Interesting, can you say if you have remote codes for oCosmo tvs?

I remember reading a postmortem about a failed hardware Kickstarter campaign (some photographic accessory: a flash remote?) and they said they contacted a professional manager from the industry who told them he wouldn't even try developing new hardware without a few million in funding, tens of millions being more common. So there, turns out making new hardware is really expensive.

Yup, it is amazing how quickly a few $10k tools, $3k tooling modifications, and sample shipping costs quickly adds up.

I laugh at most hardware Kickstarters because what they are trying to do is impossible with the funding levels you are going to get, so if it is going to be successful they should already have investors in which case they Kickstarter is just a cheap marketing campaign.

Hardware involves certifications (unless you are small-time EBay vendor).

Wow, pretty bad advice they got... The little company I work for does high end microwave equipment (satellite terminals, RF conversion equipment, 5Gbps ultra-low-latency terrestrial links used for high frequency trading, etc.) and only turns over a few million dollars per year...

I would be surprised if a flash remote cost more than two or three hundred thousand to develop and productise, tool up and do a small production run, but that's assuming you have a team with the right skills. If you're paying contract design houses then I guess it would be a lot more expensive.

As I understood the advice, that's what kind of budget it usually takes, at least in the industry of photography, to reliably create a new hardware product with the level of polish that the market is used to.

The project is the Triggertrap Ada. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/triggertrap/triggertrap...

The product could've easily been made on their budget. Their problem was outsourcing much of the development work, so they paid consultants too much money to make something that was overdesigned and way too expensive to make. When you're starting in hardware, you need to immerse yourself in the whole chain to be able to make good decisions. Shame, I liked the guys.

More practical discussion of their missteps: http://www.eevblog.com/forum/crowd-funded-projects/kickstart...

As someone with over 30 years in hardware + software + mechanical product design and manufacturing one thing that always bothers me on Kickstarter is the dishonesty of funding goals.

Now, I do realize quite a few project owners come at it without the product manufacturing experience. I definitely get that part. Yet, I don't see it as an excuse. People need to do due diligence and get numbers closer to reality.

I remember one of the first (if not the first) RGB LED light bulb project (don't remember the name), perhaps two years ago. I think they went out with a raise target of $50K. If I remember correctly, they ended-up raising nearly $2MM.

The instant I saw that campaign I knew that if they raised anywhere south of somewhere between $1MM and $2MM there was no way in hell they'd be able to get the project done and delivered. The required iterations covering DFM (Design for Manufacturing), mechanical, electrical, firmware, tooling, environmental testing and regulatory testing would burn cash as if it were free. In hardware, each iteration cost real money --and potentially lots of it. $50K was not going to make a dent.

If they go into it knowing the funding goal will not be sufficient and are banking on exceeding it, they are simply not being honest.

My scam alerts go off immediately when I see such a severe project-to-funding-target mismatch. And that's why I call it "dishonest". It could also be "naive" but, again, it's the old "ignorance of the law isn't an excuse" situation. If you are going to go on Kickstarter with a hardware project and have no prior experience in manufacturing, do everyone a favor, do your homework and set a funding goal that will not have you scam your supporters out of money when you burn through it too quickly and can't deliver.

It's probably the number one question we get asked now rebootthesystem, by people in our network who considering KS. It's a catch 22. Aim too low, you can't deliver (unless you get additional capital... which might be the point), aim too high, people don't believe you'll get there, project fails.

It's because of these incompatible goals that projects will keep going to low and keep posting eulogies on HN.

I don't understand the "people not believing you'll get there" point. The pledger loses no money if the project doesn't attain its goal so there is no reason to not pledge just because it might fail.

It doesn't seem rational, but it's a real effect. The theory is that people don't want to back a loser, and perhaps that they are psychologically purchasing the product at the point they make a pledge.

I wonder if anyone has looked at the idea of not showing the funding goal at all until it is funded (or not) or some other metric. For example, show it during the last week of the campaign.

I am trying to think of a way to allow project originators the freedom to set reasonable goals (a million, whatever) without fear of this one number becoming a drag on their campaign despite the fact that they are actually being honest about what it will take to deliver a quality product.

I think that'd be worse because a goal does create a rallying point, and is also used as a signal for how realistic funding this project is (keeping in mind that people irrationally want to back a sure thing).

Yes, it's a problem, though not like IndieGoGo's flexible funding. But I don't take it in isolation - determined creators can make a lot happen with a little money, I know.

I look more closely at the level of detail of what has been done and what needs to be done, and judge whether I think these people have few enough unknowns to complete it. But that's not a metric that most people are able to judge themselves, which is why it's a problem, and also where the Kickstarter community of other backers should kick in.

You're talking about LIFX, and many were there with you speculating on their chances to deliver. Given that Kickstarter was booming and the failures were becoming more public (and the creator hadn't even delivered his much simpler previous project), it led to this article: http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/09/18/kickstarter...

And also led Kickstarter to writing the "not a store" post and encouraging LIFX to cap their campaign.

While I hope for more diligence from project creators, I think setting a high bar to eliminate risks also eliminates many interesting Kickstarter successes.

Nice clickbait title for advertising their own product concealed as a 3 sentence "retrospective", good thing HN allows submitters to change titles to something more descriptive and less clickbaity than the original...

On the postitive side, the product itself looks quite sleek. I could use some of the features myself to limit my own time on HN, or the time my wife spends on facebook.

We're always happy to change baity titles if someone suggests a better one.

The post is a bit lightweight, but that's made up for by the substantive discussion. The author clearly struck a nerve. It's ok for that to be rewarded with a top spot on HN, even if the post is promoting something.

Congratulations, the final product looks sleek.

I have a comment about the blog post itself though. Your page took 90 seconds to load on my gigabit internet connection. The two culprits are your high resolution images of the product DSC_0031.jpg and DSC_0014.jpg. Each image is around 3MB. I would strongly recommend recompressing these down to something like 200KB or less.

Thanks, we assumed our blog engine compressed them for us.

Bad ghost blog! Very bad! Thanks for heads up mgraczyk, now a smoother 40kb of viewing pleasure.

Hacker News should automatically add the size in MB for each submission. This would a) act as a warning for mobile users (the BBC article about dark matter on the front page at the moment killed chrome on my phone because it has too many images) and b) acts as a wall of shame.

Hardware fulfillment has improved considerably since kickstarter became a preorder store for established companies[1] with lots of money[2], rather than a place to support individuals with project ideas at the prototype stage.

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/597507018/pebble-time-a...

[2] https://www.kickstarter.com/discover/categories/technology?r...

I know what you mean. Around the time of our campaign these guys [1] were on every major news website in Australia (paid ads, not stories). Their marketing budget must have been huge. I've heard Sony launches stuff under different names too just to test the market.

It does have one positive side effect though - more people come to the platform.

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nonda/get-your-macbook-...

Of all the kickstarters I've funded (and it has been a lot) only two have failed to deliver, eventually, and only one of those was a hardware project. It was an attempt to make an open-hardware GPU, and when it turned out way more expensive than he imagined, he released all the work he had done on github.

The other failed project was Neil Stephenson's "Clang!" sword fighting game. We all know how that ended >:(

Surely Clang! had significant hardware components, too?

Oh, yeah, actually forgot about that. It just bothered me that they just seemed to throw everything away. After burning through several million dollars, I think they could have at least just done a Github dump or something.

Congrats on shipping! I would be very interested to know more details about what you learned from your experience with selecting a manufacturing partner. A former client of mine had his business destroyed when his manufacturing partner in China basically stole his prototype and cut him out of the picture. What steps did you take to vet the company you partnered with?

Thanks! The vetting was a process of of evaluation really. From initially being responsive, to shipping us demo units promptly, providing assistance when we had problems etc. When it came down to actually placing the order, we felt they'd already put in enough effort that it was genuine business relationship.

Wrt getting ripped off, we were advised very early on: "If you make anything in China, it will be copied". It's for that reason our software on the box is a very thin layer. The smarts are in the cloud and on the smartphone apps.

It may not be practical for everyone, but we make sure not to use turnkey manufacturers. For example, one factory might populate and reflow boards and then assemble it into a case, but they don't have the board or case designs - we have them manufactured by other suppliers and supply them and all the components. That way no one factory can just start manufacturing our products because they don't have enough information.

Yes, they can reverse-engineer but it's harder with four or more layer circuit boards and they don't have the full BOM information.

This is also a good strategy for not getting counterfeit parts (that may not work) on your boards - you can use the suppliers and brokers you trust instead of whoever your factory decides to buy from.

How would someone begin the process of finding electronic manufacturers?

For us, it started on OpenWRT blogs, scouring Alibaba and seeing who got back to us. Later it was email lists and the network of our accelerator.

If I was going to custom design, i'd be going to maker meetups in your city, or applying to something like Hxlr8. There are also supplier/customer places that do matchmaking with additional services for a fee (HWTrek for example). I didn't use any.

Also, if you can find a Kickstarter of someone who did something at all related, ask who they used. Lots of creators are very happy to tell you!

Are there any facilitators (i.e. freelancers or consultants that have a proven track record of having brought projects to production) that are affordable? I assume most of these professionals end up at a larger company faster than you can look.

Clicking the green "Learn more" button on http://koalasafe.com/ scrolls the page to the next section in Chrome and Safari, but does nothing in Firefox and IE11. I filed a webcompat bug:

https://webcompat.com/issues/1570

Thanks mate. Admittedly we don't typically test with those browser when we push changes. :|

Selenium is great for this. For this particular case, it won't access an element unless its visible, so you can validate that the scroll happens on button press. Easy to make a quick smoke test that can run in a few browsers

While this is a technically true statement Selenium is neither easy to setup nor easy to learn. It's documentation (of at least the libraries I've used, which were the recommended ones) was atrocious and not at all consistent.

Is it just me, or are most hardware projects on kickstarter easily replaceable by cheap standard hardware like a mobile phone or a raspberry pi, and the right software?

It seems strange then, that shipping is such a big problem.

Most of the ones I've seen are. However, all the Kickstarters I've seen are targetting consumers. If your product is based on something like an RPi, then your parts costs are already much higher that they should be and your profit will be close to zero because B2C prices are typically very low.

If you are targetting commercial/industrial customers, then the added cost of standard hardware is generally not a deterrent IME.

Unrelated to the topic of the article. But I find such devices (kid surveillance, it's what it is) heinous.

Indeed.

Heinous? If you had a 7 year old, would you let them use a device with unrestricted wifi access?

For those commenting here about working with your factory ahead of time, would any of you be willing to talk a little about the process of choosing a factory to partner with? Thanks.

I have a 2-step process.

1 - Are communications easy, fast and meaningful? That's the first step. Contact more than one supplier (on a initial round, think 10 to 20). Make small challenges like posting design files on a secure site that requires the supplier to create an account...you'll get rid of a lot of unworthy suppliers that won't bother and therefore are not going to be proactive in the future.

2 - Invest in requesting prototypes (or samples if making more than one prototype does not make sense) from more than one factory ahead of time (top 3 of the step above). The good factories will perform well at this task...bad ones will deliver half-baked stuff.

With time, the very good suppliers that really want to build a business relationship with you will become obvious and you can reuse them in the future...making your life easier. Don't be lazy when looking for suppliers...that's the biggest pitfall. Invest time and money...it's important.

This sounds more or less like the process I've gone through. I have yet to explore the option of manufacturing in China....have you done this? Is the process more or less the same?

Given the importance of good communication, there are obvious additional challenges to manufacturing in China. Take baby steps and get small components, small orders first to establish trust. Finding an agent who will handle sourcing and communication can be a big help.

IMO, this process is universal and particularly effective if you are seeking suppliers on a big platform with a lot of offering like Alibaba.

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